Chapter Text
If it is true that in every stone sleeps a crystal, then in my grey boulder slumbers a sun – daubmir nadir
There was a different story, in which Bilbo Baggins left the Lonely Mountain and returned to the Shire, quieter and braver and sadder than the hobbit who had run out of his front door all those months before. He would have settled back into his life, with his stories and his memories, and been content with his books and his meals and the shadows of adventures long-passed. It wouldn’t have been an exciting life: certainly, no stories would have been written about his comfortable descent into middle age, but at least he would have known what his day was going to look like every morning.
It was hard to imagine that life, Bilbo thought as he leant over the parapets, watching Gandalf leave. It had been over a month since the battle, and though he missed the green countryside of the Shire in a vague sort of way, he rather wondered if the part of himself that belonged there had died during this trip. The old wizard had been keen to take Bilbo with him, and perhaps in that different story he would have gone. But he couldn’t help but think that if he did leave now, he would have to pretend to be that old version of himself, a mummer’s farce in a tweed waistcoat. If Thorin had died, perhaps Bilbo would have fled back over the Misty Mountains, leaving the remnants of the Company – and a little bit of his heart – behind him.
But Thorin slept on, barely living but still stubbornly clinging to life. Fili and Kili too had made it through, despite the significant injuries they had acquired, though they had yet to be allowed out of the healer’s tents. And while they lived, Bilbo found himself unable to leave.
There were many wounded in the battle, and elvish, human and dwarven healers worked tirelessly to save as many as they could. But now nearly all were back on their feet, and the strange stagnation they had found themselves in after the battle was starting to shift.
Dain’s army had stayed for the first month, but they too would be leaving soon. The Iron Mountains needed its people back, Dain had explained, a little guiltily, though his dwarves had been vital in clearing the debris from the city, sweeping it clean – or at least, free of fallen rock and decayed furniture. Even more useful had been the supply train from the Iron Mountains, with food and building materials – not for the Company alone, of course, but for the contingents that would soon be setting off from the Blue Mountains, ready to help rebuild Erebor into what it once was.
There was only one real problem with that, as far as Bilbo could tell.
No one had a clue how to actually resettle Erebor.
There was just... too much to do. They’d started to receive ravens from the Blue Mountains informing them that the caravans were setting off, that people would be with them soon – and there wasn’t even enough habitable space for all the required dwarves to sleep, let alone the families they were bringing along. It would take them months to get here, travelling slowly with so many people and supplies, but the Company was a small group, and the task of restoring Erebor – even getting it ready for those who were coming to join them – was impossible. Decades of disrepair and a stonking great dragon meant that the structural integrity of the buildings was all in question. Every room needed checking, every level needed careful excavation from the many walls that had collapsed. A thousand floors had fallen apart or were about to – the heating pipes were rusting, the light mirrors that brought sunlight into the mountain were tarnished and smashed, and the wells had been fouled by the dragon’s dung and the skin it had shed. And that was before they got to the giant golden floor that they had created, which was an absolute safety hazard in terms of both its weight and its slipperiness.
There were hundreds of floors and thousands of buildings and countless miles of mines and corridors and roads: Erebor had grown over the course of centuries into a huge and sprawling city, and everyone seemed to believe that they would just be able to turn up, brush the dust from the mantelpiece, and pick up where they had left off.
Added to that were the practical logistics of that many people living in the mountain – they needed food and water, basic supplies. The caravans would be bringing essential tools, but they would need further materials and supplies for their work, and they had no neighbours with plentiful stock. They didn’t have furniture, or bedding, or a steady supply of cloth and leather. The dragon had destroyed Laketown, and though Bard was doing an excellent job of resettling Dale, there were limited supplies to go around.
It all would have been fine, of course, had the Company actually had a plan for this stage. Dwarves, he was learning, were not at all like Hobbits, who planned out the details of small events to a meticulous level. Dwarves, it seemed, came up with grand plans, with no thought of the required nuance. Retake the mountain (somehow). Defeat the dragon (guess we’ll figure that out when we get there). Resettle Erebor (I’m sure that will all fall into place without a hitch).
Perhaps Thorin had a plan in his head, but as he was still bedridden and only drifted in and out of consciousness on the best of days, he wasn’t really in any fit state to fill the rest of them in. Oin assured them all that he was recovering, but it was hard to know what to do without their King to lead them. It was clear to Bilbo now how much the Company had relied on Thorin’s conviction and Gandalf’s planning: without the two of them, most of their discussions the early weeks after the battle had devolved into them all staring at each other, overwhelmed by the colossal task ahead of them.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” Bofur confided in him after one such meeting. “I’ve never done anything like this. Even Bombur, he’s an architect, but he is used to working on one building or project at a time. This is a hundred projects, more even, and they are all linked together and leaning on each other. We can't fix this building, because we have to reinforce that floor, but we can't do that until we check this other thing - I can't keep it all straight.”
They had tried to come up with a plan, but by the time they stood on the parapets waving off Dain’s armies, they were no closer to doing so. Bilbo couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of resignation as the army got smaller and smaller, leaving the small group of them behind.
“Some will come back,” Balin said, confidently. “Once the mountain is restored. Many of them had family from here. Most followed us west after the fall of Erebor, but there were some who went east, to kin in the Iron Mountains. They’ll want to come home, to the stone that knows them.”
“Aye,” Dwalin grunted. “They’ll come alright – once the worst of the work is done.”
At least by this point Fili and Kili were up and about, and that alone was a significant morale booster for the Company, now alone in the mountain until the Blue Mountains caravans arrived. Dain’s army tents had also been packed up, so they were now going to move into the mountain itself. The Company seemed to find this cheering, though Bilbo couldn’t help but worry about what it would feel like to be that deep underground. The royal chambers were still buried under more layers of rock than Bilbo wanted to think about, but the spacious house of Fundin still stood, thankfully sound of stone. They moved in together, Balin welcoming them into the home that was now technically his with a frown and a strange cadence to his voice. The normally collected and confident dwarf seemed shaken as they first walked through the rooms and halls of his childhood home, the fire-singed stone and empty rooms. A carving, miraculously intact though dusty, was etched above the fireplace in the main receiving room.
“That’s Fundin, our father,” he told them, gesturing to a tall, young dwarf. “And that’s his father, Farin – he’s Oin and Gloin’s grandfather too, you know. And the old dwarf next to them is Borin, our great-grandfather, second son of King Nain the second. Father had this carved when he had the house built – he always said he was going to get me and Dwalin added to it, but he never got around to it in the end.”
Bilbo wondered what it must feel like to be confronted by the ghosts of a life long since past – what Balin must be feeling, to look at the face of a father long gone and to know that he was finally home again. One hundred and seventy-one years had passed since a dwarf had stepped over the threshold of their home in Erebor: the thought of it was overwhelming. It made him feel young, and quite small, until Kili nudged him.
“Don’t worry, Mr Boggins,” he said, a name he now only used to cheer Bilbo up. “I’ve never been here either. It feels pretty weird, being the prince of a kingdom I’ve never even been to.”
Kili’s leg had been damaged in the battle: Oin assured them that he would regain mobility in time, but for the moment, he was stuck with limited mobility. He had a crutch, but even with it, the pain and fatigue meant that he couldn’t get too far. Erebor was theirs to explore and rediscover, but Kili could barely get to the end of the street. He had only been slightly mollified when Dwalin had carried him to the parapets to wave Dain off, though clearly also a little embarrassed
Fili was in slightly better shape – his six broken ribs were already healing well, though the mace he had taken to the back of the head had cracked his skull, and he still occasionally had blinding headaches that left him bedridden for days until they subsided.
Dwalin had carried Thorin’s stretcher himself, along with several of Dain’s soldiers, earlier that day. He was asleep now upstairs, watched over by Oin, who had barely left his side since the battle. The old dwarf was looking more and more tired every passing day, but he was dedicated to his task and his king.
“There’s only so much life in these old bones,” he told Bilbo gently (well, his tone was gentle, even if he was yelling a bit. He’d taken a hit to the head in the battle too, and his volume control was worse than ever). “But there’s enough to do my job. If you’re worried, try and find one of the old infirmaries – there might be something in there we can use.”
It was a mollification rather than a genuine request, but Bilbo knew that Oin was trying to give him something practical to do, to distract him. He appreciated the sentiment.
The day after Dain left, they had attempted once again to come up with a plan of what to do over the next couple of months, before the caravans were due to arrive, but once again, nothing came of it.
So Bilbo had, for better or worse, taken over. He’d got parchment and quills and he and the Company had walked the kingdom in the first few weeks in there. Thorin and his nephews slept and rested, and he mapped the mountain, each area and corridor and mine and district. They didn’t have the numbers or skill to replace the reflecting mirrors, but they rigged up some of the bigger pieces to bounce a little light around, and used lanterns to manage the rest. Bofur and Bombur had excellent stone sense, and told him which parts were dangerous and which were secure and which could hold out for a while but would need sorting out in the fullness of time (those were the most annoying). Ori and Balin helped him keep track of the information they gathered, and researched in the remnants of the library for information to fill in the gaps in their knowledge when trying to identify buildings and ruins. Nori had an excellent mind for planning, Bilbo discovered early on, with an exceptional memory for the details of buildings, though he was reticent to explain what his previous career had been that had taught him these skills. Bilbo found the old city maps and set Oin to sorting through the infirmary stock they found along the way, and Gloin and Dori stepped up to the task of organising the rest of their supplies and rations, and planning ahead for those who were coming. When Dwalin could be coaxed from keeping an eye on Fili and Kili and Thorin, he and Bifur tracked down the old armouries and tool caches throughout the city, keeping an inventory of what they had and what would need replacing.
It was a team effort, and they all settled quickly into their roles. It felt strange after so many weeks of living in the army camps to return to just their small little group, but they rubbed along together well enough. Having things to do helped, they found quickly: the only ones frustrated were Fili and Kili, who were still stuck in the house. As the group surveyed houses and buildings, they picked up any precious-looking items, old jewellery or things that might have been heirlooms, and documented where they were found. Anything damaged or broken they took back to Fili and Kili, who did their best to repair them, which kept them busy at least.
Of course, Fili’s other job was to sign off on the various polite letters that Balin and Bilbo wrote in his name, in Thorin’s stead. Luckily Balin understood the importance of playing nice with Thranduil, particularly with the caravans needing an escort through Mirkwood. Fili scrunched his nose up at the polite salutations to the elven kingdom, but was sensible enough not to argue.
It was strange to think of the lad as the prince of Erebor, next in line to the throne. He still looked too much like the rogue juggling Bilbo's plates, though there was something more serious about him now, as if some of the childish joy had been knocked out of him.
The heir-apparent crown had been lost a long time ago, but Balin dug several replacements from the hoard that might have done. Fili wouldn’t touch them though, and it wasn’t just the gold.
“I’m not putting a crown on before Thorin,” he argued, whenever Balin brought it up. “And I don’t need one anyway – I didn’t during the journey here, and I don’t now. It’s just us here, Balin.”
“Not for long,” Balin warned, and he was right, but it wasn’t enough to sway Fili.
It was strange, walking the streets of Erebor. Nearly two hundred years of ruin couldn’t dim the glory and beauty of it, but it also couldn’t hide the fact that he was walking through the ruins of a lost time and a people, through a history that had faded. There was time for it to come back, and it would, but for now it felt strange and sad to be here. His footsteps echoed as he walked, and their voices felt thin and small: he was an explorer in an unknown land, an uninvited ghost in a landscape of loss.
Their map shaped up well over their first month in the mountain, until they had a detailed plan of action and priorities. He was finally starting to feel like he understood the mountain, the sense of the building structure and planning, how everything connected and linked together. And yet, at times he couldn’t help but feel like there was something he was getting wrong – sometimes he would walk a road he had seen before, and yet it felt different, as if something imperceptible had shifted. There were draughts where he didn’t expect them, and shadows that seemed to move that he only ever caught out of the corner of his eye. The others felt it too he was sure, but no one said anything, though he often caught them glancing around themselves.
Perhaps it was a side-effect of them being alone in the mountain, he thought. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who felt small in this great place.
He almost raised it when he got back to the house the day the ravens came to tell them that the first caravan had reached the Misty Mountains, and the safety of Rivendell (though many of the dwarves were not happy to be stopping there). But everyone was excited by the news – Gloin’s wife and son were in the caravan, and he was singing in the kitchen as he stirred the stew over the fire, and Bombur was joining in – the evening felt merry, and celebratory, and he couldn’t bring himself to break it.
Instead, he went upstairs, to sit with Thorin, as he often did.
“He was awake a moment ago,” Oin told him when he walked into the room. “He asked after you, but I think he is asleep again now.”
Bilbo smiled, and shooed Oin out of the room to get some dinner.
“I’m here,” he said, sitting down beside Thorin’s bed. His… friend? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Was Thorin his friend? Perhaps they might have been, once, or at least on the way to being friends. But too much had happened between them to ignore, and Thorin’s injuries meant that they hadn’t been able to talk through what had happened, share their guilt and blame and recrimination. They had spoken, so briefly, right after the battle, when they had given each other the words of forgiveness – but words were easily given when pain and death were on the horizon. He didn’t know if Thorin truly meant it – he didn’t know if he did, either. He was caught in a specific moment, unable to move past it. He patted Thorin’s hand, gently.
“We need you to come back,” he told Thorin, quietly. “The Company needs you. Your nephews need you. And I need you, too.”
The worst part of any job, Bilbo thought wryly as Dori deposited the latest pile of letters from the Blue Mountains in front of him, was the paperwork.
All he wanted to do was rebuild Erebor – or at least, make a plan for it to happen. He thought he had done that – he had made lists and prioritised areas and the most important things. The infirmary, the store cupboards, food and materials, and the old military barracks to house the first round of people. At least one of the big communal bathhouses would be essential, and ideally more. But of course, it wasn’t that simple. Of course they couldn’t just fix things – first, they had to work out who owned what. Bilbo had, perhaps foolishly, assumed that they would focus on the repairs, but the lawyers were having none of it. People had been busy in the Blue Mountains. Dis, who Thorin had left in charge, had implemented a complex set of legal paperwork for those requesting to return to Erebor: forms had to be filled in to request land and stone. Many dwarves had claims to specific buildings or plots: old family homes and business holdings. The long lives of dwarves meant that many claimed ownership of specific places, which needed to be researched and accounted for. Unfortunately, the records were in Erebor, not the Blue Mountains, so it was left to them to dig out the ancient tomes of property ownership and business dealings. The dwarves of Erebor had been prodigious book-keepers – useful to settle claims, horrible to deal with.
Luckily Ori was in his element.
The returning dwarves wanted estimations, financial plans. They wanted damage reports and to know how much repairs would be costing them.
“Can’t we just pay for the repairs using the horde?” Bilbo had asked Balin, who had stroked his beard and smiled at him.
“We are subsidising it heavily,” he said. “Particularly for the smaller guilds, and families. Dis has been sorting out who needs the most support from her end. But the horde – it looks vast and unending, but this is a big mountain, and we’ll burn through it quicker than you’d think. And the gold is our surety against the future, Bilbo: we need to make sure there is money coming into Erebor, not just leaking out, if we are to survive the first few winters.”
He could see the logic in that, he supposed, though it did go against the Hobbit way of thinking about things. The Shire seemed very simple in comparison: you grew what you needed, and you traded that which you didn’t for something your neighbours had in abundance. Whole neighbourhoods ended up working together, one family growing the potatoes, another the alliums, another tending to the chickens, and so on. Of course, it didn’t always work – he remembered the conniption when Mrs Weaverpuff had decided not to bother with her squash seeds and cultivated a garden's worth of edible flowers instead. But the local bakers had stepped in, trading for them for midsummer cakes and wedding dinners, and it had all worked out in the end.
“It’s not just that,” Balin told him, with a small smile. “They want to know that it is theirs – that they contributed too. Dis wrote that they all keep saying that, in their applications – they didn’t help when we took the mountain back, but they want to help now, and this is how they can do that.”
And, well, Bilbo couldn’t really argue with that.
It didn’t make the administration of it any easier, though poor Fili was dealing with the brunt of it.
“I don’t know what half of this paperwork even means,” he admitted to Bilbo after the first couple of days. “It keeps citing historical laws I’ve never even heard of. Most of them pre-date the fall of Erebor – I don’t know which Dwarf took the time to smuggle legal casebooks out of the mountain when Smaug attacked, but I’d like to wring his neck. If I didn’t have Balin and Ori checking everything, I’d have probably accidentally signed the throne room off to the elves by now.”
“He’s exaggerating,” Bilbo told Thorin later that day, when he was giving him an update. He’d started doing that – he didn’t know if Thorin could hear him, but it brought him a sense of comfort to feel that he might be. “He’s doing a really good job – you’ll be very proud of him when you’re better. Though I think he’ll be glad to hand the reins back to you, and I don’t blame him. Some of these applications are downright ridiculous.
“Look at this one,” he continued, waving a piece of parchment. “This woman wants to reclaim her mother’s home. She says it is somewhere in the old smithy district, near the gate, with the blue gabled door. What am I supposed to do with that? Wander the smithy district, half of which is in ruins by the way, in the hopes of spotting a wooden door which may or may not have survived nearly two hundred years and some periodic doses of dragon-fire? Honestly, I-”
He stopped. Thorin was looking at him, his eyes open, smiling a little bit – as much as Thorin ever smiled, anyway.
“Oh,” he said, mostly to himself. “You’re awake. Do you need me to get Oin?”
Thorin shook his head. Bilbo put down the paper, and took Thorin’s hand instead. “Oin keeps saying I miss the moments when you’re awake. You’ve seen Fili and Kili though, haven’t you? And some of the others?”
“Yes,” Thorin rasped, his voice hoarse, a look of uncertainty in his eyes. “Or at least, I think so. It’s hard to know… sometimes I can’t tell if I’m dreaming.”
“Well, this is real,” Bilbo told him. “If it was a dream, I’d like to think I would have less paperwork. And much better ale.”
Thorin made a sound that might have been a huff of laughter. With what seemed like some effort, he lifted his hand, Bilbo’s own falling away, and cupped Bilbo’s face with it.
“Feels real,” he agreed. Bilbo pressed his own hand to the back of Thorin’s, holding it in place as he fell once again into sleep. Oin assured him that this was a natural part of dwarven healing, the long sleep – going to stone, they called it. Or at least, that was as close an approximation of the phrase as they could manage in Westron.
“We dwarves are hard to kill,” Oin had told him, with some pride. “Injuries that would take the lives of other races will not take us. But sometimes the injuries are so great that we sink back into ourselves, a deep state of unconsciousness, allowing our bodies to prioritise its healing. They call it going to stone, because that’s what we’re like in that state: we don’t move, we need minimal sustenance. Sometimes, dwarves in that state are mistaken for dead. Thorin’s improving – and with time he will awake more and more often, start to remember things better. And then one day his body will decide it has done enough, and he’ll… well, the words are difficult. But I supposed you might say he will rise from the stone again, and it will be like he was before. Sore no doubt, more easily tired for a while, but hale and hearty again.”
Despite the assurances, it didn’t make Bilbo feel any better.
The days and weeks passed slowly. They worked through the requests from the Blue Mountains, finding as many buildings as they could, creating a separate list for all those they could not identify or whose claims were not substantiated by the written record. Those would be dealt with in due course, by the complex legal system of Erebor, but right now that was a future problem. It would take a long time before they ran out of land or ruined buildings to allocate. There was another list, one that Bilbo had labelled ‘troublemakers’, for those that would require some sort of intervention in due course – two siblings both applying for their mother’s forge, a guild claiming larger buildings than they had ever been allocated according to the records, even one dwarf who did not seem to have any Ereborian lineage whatsoever but seemed absolutely adamant that his distant but beloved aunt had always wanted him to inherit her suspiciously large manor house.
“Chancers and wasters,” Nori pronounced. “There’ll be con artists and thieves making their way to the mountain beyond reckoning before too long.”
He said this with the great conviction of someone who might have known slightly too much about it. Dwalin cleared his throat, and the two of them stared each other down, Bilbo sat between them, only the three of them in the room that afternoon. Theirs was a curious relationship: they rarely spoke around the Company, but on the journey, Bilbo had often seen them sleeping back to back, and some mornings now saw Dwalin sporting braids that seemed far more complex than anything he would normally wear. Whatever their history, it seemed long and complex, but Bilbo wasn’t going to pry into the particulars of it.
“What sort of system was there in Ered Luin for this sort of thing?” he asked instead. “In the Shire we don’t tend to have many issues beyond the occasional faunt scrumping apples. On the odd occasion there is a need for it, the locals tend to bring the offending hobbit to the local mayor, who will pass judgement.”
The corner of Dwalin’s mouth twitched. “Not quite like that, no. We have guards of the peace in Gabilgathol-”
“Where?”
Dwalin crossed his arms. “Gabilgathol. Our city in the Blue Mountains.”
Bilbo gaped. “How have I never heard the name before?”
Nori patted his arm. “We don’t normally share it with outsiders - but you’re practically a dwarf at this point. Besides, you’d probably know it as Belegost, with all your elvish reading.”
“I thought that was destroyed – long ago?”
Dwalin rolled his eyes. “Typical elves, they all stop writing when it isn’t about them anymore. Most of the dwarves from the Blue Mountains travelled east at the end of the first age, when Gabligathol and Tumunzahar were lost. But some stayed, rebuilt as best they could – and when we were cast out, they took us in again.”
Bilbo was aghast. “So there have been cities in the Blue Mountains for centuries, and no one has ever written about them? That’s… well, that’s terrible. We shall have to rectify this as soon as possible. Make sure that what they have done is remembered.”
Dwalin was staring at him – the corner of his mouth was twitching, and he coughed. “Well, that’s good of you,” he said, after a moment. “Aye, it is.”
Nori’s eyes were warm as he watched Dwalin, and he still looked like he was trying not to smile when he turned back to Bilbo, to continue their discussion about the guard.
It was agreed that a new guard would need to be implemented, ideally before the second set of caravans arrived. It wouldn’t need to be extensive, not at this stage, but they would need to find a way to make sure that people were safe. Dwalin agreed he made the most sense to plan and spearhead it, at this point – he had trained most of the guards in the Blue Mountains, had worked with them and as one of them in the past. He was a trusted entity to guards who already knew the role, could train those new to it, and was best placed to make decisions about any guards who definitely should not be offered similar positions of power in Erebor.
“A lot of the people I’ve been talking about,” Nori said, towards the end. “I… times were hard in the Blue Mountains. We didn’t have a lot, and the stone wasn’t always safe – some dwarves are rotten, right enough, but there are a lot that are just desperate. A lot who might go in for some honest work, if it was there and there weren’t people breathing down their necks for references and the like.”
“Well,” Bilbo said, tapping his quill against the corner of his mouth. “Relocation is a complex business. Lots of things go missing, when you move across the world – I don’t have a single button or handkerchief I left with, you know.”
Dwalin was looking at him like he’d grown a second head, but Nori’s eyes were narrowed. He’d gone very still – Bilbo could barely hear him breathing.
“It strikes me that we could do with someone to oversee that kind of thing,” he continued. “Someone to help and sponsor a dwarf in a difficult situation. Someone they’d listen to, who perhaps been through similar things, in the past. Just a thought, of course,” he added at the end, getting to his feet. “Now, I really do have to go see a man about a blue door. Please excuse me.”
To his surprise, he actually did find the house with the blue door that afternoon – it felt like a good omen.
Kili’s leg healed slowly but well – soon he was able to start hobbling around the mountain more extensively, and once he had started there was no stopping him. He had always been an enthusiastic lad, and now it was as if two months of unspent energy was trying to get out of him in one go. He ran errands and helped in any way he could – though he was thrown out of the library in just a few hours.
“S’not my fault,” he told Bilbo petulantly. “There’s a lot of dust in there – it’s not like I was trying to sneeze. And it only destroyed a little bit of the manuscript Ori was looking at. The way I see it, if a book is so old it is just going to disintegrate like that, it probably isn’t worth keeping around anyway.”
“I dare you to say that to Ori’s face,” Bilbo told him. Kili pulled a woebegone expression.
“Why do you think I got kicked out?”
Kili was good company, for all his loudness. His sweetness and good humour lifted Bilbo’s spirits on his many days cooped up with paperwork or trying to track down houses, and he had many a good story about life in the Blue Mountains, his childhood that seemed to be spent exclusively annoying members of the company and his mother, and inevitably, Thorin. Those were Bilbo’s favourites, though of course he wouldn’t admit to anything like that.
Even the strangeness of the ruined city bothered him less with Kili around, though it was still there, a perpetual feeling of unease. He still hadn’t brought himself to mention it to the others, feeling a little ridiculous about the whole thing.
“You know,” he told Kili, when they were trying to find the entrance to a mine that was on the city plans, but they couldn’t seem to locate. “I’ve been communicating with Bard about supplies, and it all seems to be going fairly well. But I think it would be a show of good faith if someone went down to Dale soon, to check in on how they are doing, send our best regards, that kind of thing.”
Kili perked up immediately. There had been absolutely no mention of the red-haired elven captain since the battle, though sometimes Bilbo had spotted him writing furtive letters in the corner of rooms, with the expression of someone who was definitely not writing to his mother.
“Bard mentioned that the Mirkwood garrison will be there a few months yet, to help out,” he continued. “So really it would be a diplomatic mission on two fronts. Feels like the kind of thing we would really need to send someone important out to do – wouldn’t want to ruffle any feathers.”
Kili was beaming by now. “Bilbo, you’re the best,” he told him, quite sincerely, before grabbing him with one arm in a rough hug. Bilbo rather got the impression that he would have been picked up and spun around if Kili’s leg had been up to it. But then his face drew into a frown.
“But what about Thorin?” he said, quietly. “What if he wakes up, and I’m not there? And what if Fili needs me, or Balin, or…”
“Kili,” Bilbo said, gently. “We’ll all help Fili if he needs it, and any of the Company for that matter. I’m not suggesting you run away forever – just a couple of days. But if it makes you feel any better, it would be best to go now, before the caravans start to arrive. We’ll all be a lot busier then.”
Kili nodded, mouth twisting. “And… Uncle?”
“If Thorin wakes up properly,” Bilbo said, alarmed to realise that his voice was catching. “Well, I’ll send a raven right away, alright? And you know what he is like, he’s always grumpy when he wakes up anyway, and-”
He stopped, suddenly aware that his eyes were damp. Kili was looking at him in horror, and immediately bundled him up in a hug again, all awkward limbs and good intentions.
“Oh no, Bilbo,” he said. “Please don’t be sad – I didn’t mean to upset you! Uncle will be fine, he always is, and if he isn’t awake by the time Mum gets here she’ll yell at him until he gets up anyway.”
“I know lad, I know,” Bilbo replied, rubbing at his eye with the flat of his palm. “Don’t worry, I’m alright. I don’t know what came over me.”
“You’re working too hard,” Kili said, letting him go. “Don’t think we don’t all notice. Uncle’s going to feel so guilty when he wakes up that you’ve sorted out all the hard stuff for him. And you didn’t have to, not at all – you’ve already done more than enough to get us our kingdom back.”
“Well,” Bilbo said, trying to pull himself back together. “We always step in to help family out, don’t we? And you rowdy lot are as close as I’ve really got to family these days, so I’d feel bad indeed if I didn’t help.”
He would have said more, but he was startled out of his train of thought: the hair on his arms stood on end suddenly, as if a cold breath had blown on the back of his neck. He rubbed his arms reflexively, but as he shifted he saw something else move, something that slithered, pale and mist-like, but when he turned –
Nothing.
“Did you see that?” he whispered.
Kili was staring back at him, wide-eyed. His mouth opened, as if he was going to say something – but in the end all the lad could do was nod.
He debated bringing it up again, but a few days passed and he hadn’t said anything about what he had seen to the others, though he thought Kili might have told his brother. He had meant to, but by the time they had got back to the warmth and light of the house, it felt a little silly, and he had half-convinced himself it had been nothing, a trick of the light and shadow or a particularly enterprising rat.
Despite any misgivings he had, he found himself full of optimism a few days later, as he watched the arrival of the first caravan. The Company had gone to greet them, but Bilbo was an unknown entity, and he felt strange about being part of the welcoming committee. They had received multiple letters from the Blue Mountains about the members of this first group, nearly two hundred of them all told. Miners and builders and stonemasons, architects and carpenters – and their husbands and wives, children and parents. The most welcome addition had been the number of lawyers – finally Bilbo and Fili would be able to give up the incomprehensible legal paperwork and leave it in the hands of the experts.
He got to know many of the dwarves soon enough though, because whilst the question of ownership was no longer his, it seemed the Company were still determined to keep him central to the overall planning.
The labour of his days was now given over to chivvying, arguing and convincing a number of highly skilled dwarves that they needed to follow a plan designed by a hobbit who had never done a day's worth of manual labour beyond pottering in his garden before. Luckily, he found that for the most part, they would listen if Bilbo gave them a full and thorough explanation. It took a while, but he found over the next few weeks that he was growing quite skilled and making a clear and well-reasoned argument.
The barracks were also causing problems, as all communal living tends to do. They all knew what they were getting into, and rubbed along well enough, but many people always required management. Rotas for cooking and cleaning and laundry and childcare had to be created, with careful negotiation. They also realised that they had neglected to make any plans for the education and care of the children of the first caravan, and had to cobble together lessons at the last minute. Luckily Balin had tutored Fili and Kili in their youth and was able to step in while Bilbo penned a missive to Dis begging for some teachers to be sent in the third caravan, which was shortly to leave – the second had already set out, and would soon be reaching the Misty Mountains according to their latest raven.
Watching the dwarves work was eye-opening. He had heard his Company talking about stone-sense and had even seen them using it, but he hadn’t fully appreciated what it meant. He supposed he had thought they were just looking at the stone, using experience and knowledge to guide them, but the reality of it was far more complex. He had been a little dismissive, he realised with some guilt.
All dwarves, it seemed, had an awareness of the rock around them, and those with the gift for it could sense fractures in the rock, the type and quality of it, veins of metals and gemstones running through it. It was much like the gifts certain hobbits had for feeling the soil – those who could tell whether it was too acidic, or needed more fertiliser, or who could tell whether seeds had germinated or if a tree was going to blossom that year. He supposed it made sense, but watching them work still felt miraculous. A dwarf trying to clear a boulder would run his hands over it, think for a moment, and then strike a particular point with his hammer only for it to split into several smaller pieces quite easily and cleanly.
“It’s like… it’s like I can see it,” Bofur tried to explain when he pressed him. “Like I can see the cracks and fissures and pressure points, but I’m not seeing it. Oh, I don’t know, it’s not something easy enough to explain.”
Bilbo thought he understood anyway. He remembered his father pressing his hands to the soil of his tomato patch, smiling with his eyes closed. Bilbo had never been all that great at it, to his chagrin.
He started to talk to the dwarves about it, to try and understand it better, and he found that endeared him more to them than anything else he had been trying. He explained the hobbit affinity for living things to them, and though they were initially a bit snooty about it (“bit… elf-like, that,” was the standard response), as soon as he explained the practical role it played, they warmed up to it quite well. It was hard to deny the use of the skill, he supposed: there was a reason Shire ale and pipeweed were renowned, and a big part of it was knowing exactly when the plants were right for harvest, and when a barrel needed turning. And it saved a lot of time when it comes to harvesting vegetables if you could tell from the outset if they were ready or not, and encourage them to grow bigger.
“Can you show us?” one stone mason asked after Bilbo had been explaining. She pointed to a patch of tiny white flowers – stone-flowers, he’d learned. They were hardy little plants, that could grow in the minuscule amounts of soil that accumulated in the cracks in the rock, and could survive happily in the reflected mirror-light. There used to be a lot of it around Erebor, but now it only grew in small patches. Another reason to get the mirrors fixed soon.
“Well, I’ve never had much skill myself,” he said, but he tried anyway. To his surprise, the small flowers turned to his fingertips, as if they had been waiting for him.
“Oh,” he said, in a small voice. “This one will put out new flowers soon.”
“Well, look at that,” the stone mason said, smiling. “Never seen a plant react like that.”
“I was never very good at it in the Shire,” Bilbo repeated, still watching the little flower.
“Maybe you just needed different types of plants.”
He learned a lot from the Blue Mountains dwarves, about their skills and work but also about their family and friends, those with them and those left behind. Some of the older dwarves among them remembered Erebor, but most had been born after the fall or had been so young when they left that they didn’t have any memory of their homeland. There was a joy in working with the different groups as they rediscovered Erebor through their work: Bilbo found himself warming to the kingdom through their eyes. Many of the members of this group had homes of their own that they had claimed, or had been promised an allocation in thanks for their early work. They were not uncovering a lost world as Bilbo had been: they were learning about their new home, building walls and streets that their children, and their grandchildren, would know and love.
He heard their stories and songs, and though often they were sung in Khuzdul he enjoyed the melody of them, the emotions that came through even when he didn’t know the words. He taught them songs from the Shire too, the bawdy tavern chants, the midsummer refrains, the melodies shared across field and farm. Erebor, slowly but surely, started to feel more like a place of life again. Like a place that could be his home in the fullness of time.
And there were still mysteries to unpack. One day, in a built-up area near the central forges, they came across a jut of rock, sticking right up in the middle of the street, incongruous and inconvenient: the Ereborians of old had had to widen the street on either side of it to make sure carts and crowds could get around it, rather than simply removing it, which to Bilbo’s eye it would have been quite easy to do.
“Why do you think they never did anything with this?” he asked the group he was working with that day.
“That’s living stone,” one told him, and at his blank face, shook her head and smiled. “Keep forgetting you don’t know about that kind of thing. Some stone – it’s hard to explain really, but it is like it’s living, like there is a soul in the rock. Might be the remnant of something good or bad that once happened nearby, or a spirit, or just the age of it. Some stone remembers things, the good and the bad. You wouldn’t break stone like that, not unless there was a desperate reason. It’s bad luck, and… well, it feels a little bit like killing something.”
Bilbo remembered the dwarves touching the trolls after they had turned to stone, shuddering at the feeling of it. He’d thought it was just at the thought of what might have happened to them, but now he couldn’t help but wonder.
Everything should have been well – and in many ways it was. Having more people around definitely helped with the strangeness of the mountain, though before long he caught sight of people’s expressions as they turned too quickly, the way that some dwarves would stare at dark spaces with a frown, as if trying to work out what they had just seen. It wasn’t just him, he started to realise – though exactly what it was remained mysterious.
One day, he slipped on his little ring – he had to bring it out especially, for he had taken to leaving it in his room, quite forgetting about it – and sat in a shadowy corner, as still as he could be, to see if he could catch sight of something. He had wondered if it would be easier to spot whatever it was if it couldn’t see him, but he was to spend his day frustrated. Whatever it was, it was elusive, and he ended the day with a headache and no further results.
Wearing the ring had never been a bother for him before, but now that Smaug was gone he found that it was uncomfortable to wear it in the mountain – something seemed to weigh heavily on him, a pressure behind his eyes that he could not escape. With some relief, he hid his ring away again, and would forget about it for quite some time.
Things were improving across Erebor, but as the months rolled on there was also positive progression with its king, as well. Thorin was staying awake for longer and longer, Oin told him – he always gave Bilbo updates when he got home, and he always listened to them, even on days he was so tired all he wanted to do was collapse into the mattress he had tucked away in one of the smaller upstairs rooms and sleep until the world ended. He was having conversations, seemed more alert, and was starting to remember them the next time he woke. This was all a very positive improvement, Oin reassured him, but it couldn’t help but fill Bilbo with a certain anxiety. Thorin never seemed to leave any messages for him, and he wondered if perhaps Thorin was still angry, if he was still processing Bilbo’s betrayal. It was hard to forget the coldness in his eyes, the feeling of hands around his throat. He didn’t regret stealing the Arkenstone, not for a moment, but he did regret the way it had been done, how the whole thing had gone. Bilbo wasn’t sure what a near-deathbed forgiveness meant in the grand scheme of things, or even if Thorin would remember it, with the pain and poppy-milk. He started staying out for longer and longer days, missing dinner at the house in order to avoid being there when Thorin was likely to wake.
It made him feel like a coward, but he wasn’t sure what else to do.
One side effect of his staying out was that he was not seeing much of the Company at the moment, nor of Gloin’s family beyond a cursory introduction to his wife. She and Gloin’s son had stayed in the barracks at first: Vilmi had led the caravan and had been busy working with Dwalin and Bofur to review the tools and materials they had, and what else would be needed in the coming months. Often he found herself in the same room as her, both of them so busy they had no time to say anything more to her than a passing greeting. But over time, as the caravan had settled in, she and Gimli had moved into the Fundin house – or at least, so Bilbo had been told. He’d taken to staying the occasional night at the barracks, on days where he was getting in late and set to head out with another group early the next morning, and in truth wasn't spending enough time at the Fundin house to be on top of the gossip.
But one afternoon all work paused, for the celebration of a dwarfish holiday. Bilbo took the opportunity to use the bathhouse in peace and quiet, scrubbing what must have been a week’s worth of stone dust and grit out of his hair – the old him would be horrified, he thought, even more so by the rough trousers and tunic he put on once he was clean. Thinking he would be at a bit of a loose end for the rest of the day, he was surprised to find someone waiting for him outside the bathhouse – the dwarf he knew to be Gloin’s son. His red hair was loosely braided, and his beard (much longer than Kili’s, to his frustration) was oiled and neatly clasped. Dwarves always took care of their beards and hair (in fact, many were slightly horrified by Bilbo’s own neglected curls), but given their current situation, did not normally look this formal. He felt a little bit guilty – the holiday was clearly a special one, and he hadn’t even thought to buy anyone a gift.
“Gimli, son of Gloin, at your service,” the dwarf said, with a low bow. “My Ma sent me to say that you are to come to the dinner that Bombur has spent five hours making, and if you are to be polite and decline then I am to convince you that doing so is not an option.”
“Is that what she said?” Bilbo said, a little bemused. Gimli looked up from his low bow, grinning.
“Well, she didn’t put it quite like that, but I got the gist.”
Bilbo laughed, despite himself. “Then I supposed refusing wouldn’t do me any good, would it?”
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Gimli told him, swivelling on his heel and heading in the direction of the house, forcing Bilbo to follow.
“I hope you haven’t been working too hard,” Gimli told him. “Everyone seems very worried, and though I’m sure it has nothing to do with me or my mother, if you keep staying away, you might give us a complex.”
Bilbo found himself laughing again. “You’re a silver-tongued lad and no mistake – it’s just so busy around here, that’s all.”
Gimli hummed, before abruptly changing the subject.
“I’ve heard lots of stories about you, you know. Everyone’s talking about it. How you spoke to the dragon, and rescued the Company from the dungeons of the elves and brokered the peace between us and Dale, and how you fought in the battle, and now how you’re in charge of rebuilding the mountain. Auntie Dis says yours are the only sensible letters coming out of Erebor, and that’s high praise from her.”
“Wait,” Bilbo said, feeling a little wrong-footed. “I’m not in charge.”
“That’s not what Fili and Kili say.”
Bilbo’s mouth was open, ready to protest further, but Gimli paused. They were at the top of their street now, and the windows of the Fundin house were glowing, warm and inviting. The sound of laughter reached them even here.
“I wanted to thank you,” Gimli said, sweetly sincere. He looked like a dwarf grown to Bilbo’s eyes, taller than him and with his rich beard, but there was something young in his eyes that pulled on Bilbo’s heartstrings. “If it wasn’t for you, my Da would still be wasting away in a rotten elvish dungeon. The bastards would never have let him go. So I am in your debt, Master Baggins.”
“Please,” he replied, slightly discomforted by the praise. “It’s Bilbo. I really didn’t do all that much. And you know, most elves aren’t all that bad. You might even like them if you got to know them.”
“I doubt there is an elf on earth I could be friends with,” Gimli said, with his nose in the air. “I think I could live until the end of time without ever coming across one.”
Later, after a fine dinner, Bilbo managed to corner Fili and Kili.
“Did you tell your cousin that I’m in charge of rebuilding the mountain?” They turned innocent expressions to him, which he did not believe for a moment.
“Well, you basically are, aren’t you? And I’m very grateful because I would have to be doing it otherwise, and I don’t think I’d manage as well as you do.” Fili’s cheeks were pink from the warmth of the room: it made him look much younger.
“You’re the one making all the plans and decisions and making sure everything gets done,” Kili added, wrapping an arm around Bilbo’s shoulder. His walking was much improved by now, but the lines of tiredness and pain were still etched around his eyes.
“And you’re doing it without annoying anyone too much – it’s very impressive, you know,” Fili said. Somehow he’d wriggled around to Bilbo’s other side, so now he stood pressed between them.
“Besides, we want to make sure that everyone knows what you’re doing,” Kili told him, his voice quiet.
“Why?”
“Well… we know what you’ve done,” the young dwarf continued. “And everyone in the first caravan loves you, because they’ve had time to see how great you are. But when all the other dwarves get here, they might be a bit confused, you know, especially as the caravans get bigger. But if everyone knows about you before – if they read letters that mention you, and everyone knows how much good you’ve done, then people will appreciate you properly.”
“And then no one will be rude to you,” Fili said, nudging his side.
“And then you won’t want to go,” Kili finished, and they both beamed at him, like two faunts who had just baked their first pie.
“Oh,” Bilbo said, his throat thick. “Oh, boys.”
Their eyes widened simultaneously, and they stepped back from him, suddenly looking very sorry for themselves. “Sorry, Bilbo. We didn’t mean to make you feel awkward,” Kili said, his voice a little quieter.
Bilbo patted both their arms. “You’re… you’ve very good lads, do you know that?”
“You’re not mad?” Fili asked. The candlelight threw the scars on his face into sharp relief, and he thought he would always remember Fili this way, beautiful and young and old all at once. Bilbo’s heart felt full.
“No, I’m not. And I’m not planning on running out the door without saying goodbye. But you know, I can’t promise what will happen. I need to speak to Thorin about it properly. It might be he doesn’t want me to stay, you know, after everything. When he’s well and has had time to think it all over, I mean, and-”
“Of course he would want you to stay!” Fili protested.
“You did nothing wrong! He knows that now! He keeps asking-” Kili cut himself off abruptly when Fili nudged him sharply in the ribs.
“What does he keep asking?”
The two looked at each other. “Well, he… he keeps asking if we are sure you’re not still angry with him.”
“And Uncle Thorin isn’t very good with feelings, so that is very expressive where he is concerned,” Fili added.
“Oh, well,” Bilbo replied, and coughed. “Well, that’s… that’s good, then.”
He felt a little warm under the collar, despite himself, and quickly excused himself to get a cup of water. It was… well, it was good, to know that Thorin was worried about the same thing. It made him feel slightly foolish for avoiding him these past few weeks, but perhaps it was for the best that he spoke to Thorin properly for the first time knowing that the dwarf was just as worried as he was. Something sharp and aching shifted in his chest, and for the first time in months he felt the pain of it ease.
He was caught up soon enough in the joys of pudding and singing, but as the group made their way to bed he found himself in Thorin’s room, holding his hands, watching the way the candlelight caught the silver of his hair. He looked so much better than the last time he saw him, and Bilbo swallowed down the guilt at how many days had passed since he had last sat here. Thorin’s face was calm like this, in a way it so rarely was when he was awake, and he could see the similarity between the king and his nephews all the better. It made him wonder what Thorin had been like as a boy, as a young man, a proud prince of a beautiful kingdom, before decades of war and loss stripped the innocence away from him.
“What are you doing, worrying the boys, you idiot?” he asked him, not expecting an answer. He was holding Thorin’s hand again, and he raised it to his mouth, pressing a kiss against the scarred line of his knuckles. “Stop asking them if I’m angry at you, and ask me instead.”
“I don't think I am anymore, by the way,” he told him, his voice a little thin. “At this point I mostly just miss you.”